Deregulation

I am wondering how the 650,000 people in Massachusetts are feeling about deregulation after they lived without electricity for over a week in some cases after an October snow storm. The communities which suffered the most were the same communities which rallied to support Tea Party candidate Scott Brown for U.S. Senate. Senator Brown is a strong proponent of deregulation and privatization.

The utilities threw up their hands and shrugged. "Nothing could have prevented this," they whined. This is a bold-faced lie, of course. The true statement would have been, "Nothing could have prevented this and assured us of our huge annual profits." In other words, the utility companies could be burying wires all over the Commonwealth but do not do so unless the taxpayers of cities and towns foot the bill. They will do their job responsibly as long as they are paid to do it by the governments to which they refuse to be accountable by financing politicians who protect them from regulation.

After decades of building the best utility infrastructure in the world, the American public was sold deregulation by Huckster-in-Chief, Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s. Reagan was a puppet of the military-industrial complex, which included the petro-energy industries. Since deregulation, infrastructure has deteriorated all over the United States. The shell game created by dividing out energy production from energy delivery allowed the utility companies to shrug off responsibility over and over again.

The fact that the electric grid failed for over a week in October in New England in 2011 speaks for itself, no matter what rationalizations are offered by the wealthy utility executives. A religious person might see this "act of God" as retribution for the American destruction of the electric grid of Iraq. I simply see it as another political choice of corporate greed over progress by government and business.